I love this inventive and environmental way to rack your bikes by using a pair of wood pallets. I couldn’t find the original source of this image, but while researching it, I found another good example of a wood pallet bike rack. That site offers some good advice: make sure to inspect for exposed nails that may puncture your tires. [via BikeHacks]

Matt Richardson is a San Francisco-based creative technologist and Contributing Editor at MAKE. He’s the co-author of Getting Started with Raspberry Pi and the author of Getting Started with BeagleBone.

Seeing wood pallet projects that are presented as “green” always bothers me. Pallets are not single use conveyances meant to get products from point to A to B and then be discarded. Pallets are already “green” because they are made to be reused over and over again. When you take a pallet and make something with it, you are not reducing the waste stream, you are increasing the consumption stream because somewhere a new pallet will have to be made to take its place. If instead you took the pallet to many of the thousands of pallet dealers across the country (many of whom will even give you a few bucks for it) the pallet will return to the reuse stream and may get hundreds or thousands of uses over its lifetime. Some companies even stamp or paint their pallets so that they get them back.

Making things with good pallets is not environmental responsibility and even broken pallets are often repaired by pallet dealers. Food for thought. :)